WHEN THE DEPRESSION ENDS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21542, 14 January 1932, Page 6

WHEN THE DEPRESSION ENDS.

It was remarked by Professor Macmillan Brown in his address at the opening of the session of the New Zealand University Senate yesterday that the most remarkable feature of the present depression is its universality. No disaster occurs in any country that is without its effect elsewhere. A drought in Australia, a flood in China, riots on the Continent, the failure of a cotton crop, a mine explosion, even the collapse of a Stock JExehange boom in the United States —all have an influence that extends throughout the world. But the causes of the depression that is now exercising the minds of statesmen, financiers, and economists everywhere, and that has brought about a general reduction of purchasing power, lie deeper and are of wider range than those to which most of the depressions of the past can be traced. It is partly for this reason that we repeatedly hear the present crisis described as the most serious in history. It is by no means certain that it is the worst the world has seen. Professor Hurafrey Miehell, of M'Master University, Canada, is one of those who do not accept the view

that more severe depressions have not been suffered in the past. It is, in his opinion, only because to-day we think in millions where our forefathers thought in thousands that we consider the present depression to be the worst in history. “Let us,” he saj r s, “open our history books and read the story of the great crisis known as the South Sea Bubble, which brought England to the very verge of ruin so long ago as 1720. Let us read of the great crisis in England in 1825, that closed scores of banks and ruined thousands. The great crisis of 1837 in the United States, the collapse of the railway boom of 1857, the world-wide depressions of 1873 and 1893 were proportionately more severe and disastrous than what we have suffered from of late.” And out of each crisis, he adds, the world emerged stronger and richer and more prosperous than before. Professor Stephen Leacock is another Canadian economist who surveys the stricken world with the eye of an optimist. National prosperity in thS long run. he writes, does not depend on stock exchanges and margins and market prices. “ National wealth is based on the land, the resources and the character and the temper of the people.” Luckily for the Canadians, as far as their economic basis goes, they are a people, Professor Leacock says, with a vast heritage, enormous assets, boundless natural wealth, most of it still intact and untouched. New Zealand, like Canada, possesses great national resources and possesses also a people that has the industry and the intelligence and the grit to develop these resources to advantage. And when the depression has cured itself, as depressions, Professor Leacock says, have a way of doing, New Zealand may enter once again into the full enjoyment of the goodly heritage with which she is blessed.